Hello and welcome back to Pie ponders in which Pie tries to understand things. This is a different type of Pie ponders, in which I try to better understand what drives certain arguments with the help of crowdsourcing – that is where you bunch come in. You need to use crowdsourcing and big data and machine learning these days to stay relevant you know, basic bitch reasoning don’t cut it no more. So to proceed…
Today I focus on the debate about private X and public – aka state managed tax funded through the lens of competition. As a libertarian I think you know where I stand. Off course, I have my biases, and I try to listen to the opposite opinion. In this case I am, as in most others, at a loss to understand the fetish some have for the concept of public and their opposition to competition. I leave it to the commenters to point out where my thoughts and arguments may be wrong.
To generalize, we want X, and doing it requires people, materials, management, in general cash, mullah, dough. So the debate boils down to who uses these things better and I struggle to understand how some believe it is the government.
So what are the arguments? One would be against profit, which supposedly takes away money from the actual task at hand, but this is, in itself, irrelevant. If X is accomplished better and cheaper overall while some money goes to profit than when it does not, profit is not in any way a waste. It is a cost of efficiency. Profit is, in fact, often a valuable signal. It tells a company whether they are doing what they should. In commie Romania, many factories were not driven by profit and had no competition to speak of, and yet, shockingly, were extremely inefficient, had stocks of products that no one wanted and shortages of products in demand, all of poor quality, and overall no way of knowing if the way they produce is good. In general if a company changes something and profit improves, they get the info that the change was good.
Beyond the first argument, some people seem to have the ridiculous notion that for certain X, no one should make a profit, because that is somehow immoral. Why this is, I could never understand. Beyond money bad. There is the argument that profit incentivizes people to maximize profit instead of maximizing X, but in a market situation that is not distorted by government, most times the two things go hand in hand. And furthermore, how can one know they are maximizing X?
In the end, all people want profit. Or better said increased satisfaction. But in the public healthcare systems of Europe, doctors who at dinner parties will claim “making a profit from healthcare is immoral” – happened to me several times – and a month later strike for higher salaries. But that is not profit somehow.
A second observation of mine is humans overall perform better when there is competition. This should be a straightforward fact, but somehow isn’t. This has two factors. One, simply because humans can easily get complacent if there is not something to keep them on their toes. Second, if you have different concepts, ideas, methods to organize an activity, there really is no better way to see which works best except letting them compete. Due to the many complexities of the world, second and third order effects, unknown unknowns, you cannot outright say which way is better, which is what bureaucrats and governments claim to do.
X, people will say, it is too important to be left to competition. Or competition does not work for X. Why competition would work for something else and not for X is not always clearly explained. But what is the alternative? The dream of a group of “experts” figuring out the best way, which does not work nor has it ever worked?
The fact about X – healthcare, education, whatever – being too important is also not a valid idea. The thing about competition is that it either works or it doesn’t. It is not it works for product A but not for product B. Because the product is not the key here, the human is. The importance of X does not in any way change the fact that humans do not function efficiently without competition. You need buildings, people, and supplies. As such these are subject to the same economic laws as coffee or clothing.
I find it strange how people believe the human perceived importance of something changes the underlying issues. If a plane is crashing, physics cares not about how important it is to the passengers to recover. If competition is necessary to make TVs, it is necessary for healthcare.
The way I see it is this: the things that are key is not the field or product, but humans and human nature. Going from cars to medicine does not change the fact that humans are involved, and the same constraints of humanity apply in the same fashion. You still need labor, allocation of capital, decision making. There is still self-interest, dishonesty, ego, the whole package. These do not go away because healthcare is important.
There are many bad arguments against competition. One is someone loses. Sometimes sure, but the loser is not taken out back and shot. Yes from competing ideas, if one is better, the worse one is abandoned, that is a good thing. Unless every single thing needs to be implemented so someone does not feel bad. Another is working together is better than against each other. Which, like most things meant for children, idiots and leftists, sounds superficially good. Until you realize that cooperation has limits and it will hit the invariable issue of being unable to automatically see what works best from multiple solutions.
Competition is a race to the bottom is also popular, although what this is based on escapes me. Certainly not of the high quality of government monopoly services or the how bureaucrats strive to make things easier on the public. Not when privatizing certain services or introducing competition usually is accompanied by significant improvements in efficiency. In competitive private sectors, plenty of high quality products are made, unlike government owned businesses thorough history. So what is this race to the bottom?
We cannot gamble with our children’s future, I heard. But what is the alternative? Sticking them all in a failing system? Or the alternative is the magic committee of experts solving all problems?
In the end, decisions have to be made, and the general idea for some seems it is better to be made by bureaucrats than by people receiving a given service. While I do understand how this could be an issue for emergency services – cannot choose hospitals while you are unconscious, there are multiple ways to solve it in a private system.
There have been a myriad of studies for private vs public education, healthcare and such. And the concept that public works better is simply not supported, no matter how much proponents claim. This will not be solved anytime soon given the massive bias in all studies made, by either side, the massive amount of information existing and missing, and the impossibility of controlled experiments. I will not do a literature review on this, I am trying to approach this by basic reason. Some strict empiricists will dismiss such arguments, but I do not see strict empiricism working in this case.
A further issue is that, when you look at it, in general, bureaucrats are not always the most competent of people. Certainly, the best and brightest seldom dream of becoming civil servants. Nor are they more motivated, more caring or in general better people, and outside leftist delusions you have no reason to believe they would be. Most countries on this planet have plenty of literature and art mocking bureaucrats. So it is quite a known phenomenon.
But I want to give an example of what I mean. The significant innovation and cost reduction introduced in the field of space exploration. SpaceX – whatever you may think of E.M. – is quite the success. This was clear when European government audits a while back informed the European Space Agency that it will be in no way competitive in the future if it does not radically change its MO. And the ESA and Ariane and their other contractors reacted by starting to research reusable rockets, using in part SpaceX innovations, by contracting with more companies and startup, by pushing innovation. This raises the question: why did they not really do this before competition forced it? Why I think this is relevant? Because, if you want to see a field which does attract the best and brightest, this is it. These are people who are at the top of their field, the best education, and furthermore many of them do work they enjoy and are passionate about. And still, without some competition, they were complacent for years and the innovation rate quite slowed down. If in this field this happened, why expect differently for others?
Comments
284 responses to “A thought on competition and the public sector”
Only losers hate competition.
Customers sure should love it because it is the best way to get innovation and good prices.
Originally I was not going to post this cause on review it seemed off… like it did not work. But decided to anyway. So feel free to criticize the points.
Oh, so you want criticism on the merits?
Almost no one is commenting… hmm it is worse than I thought.
You have it backwards. No one is commenting because we read it and nodded our heads. Yep. Yep. Yep. He’s got it. Yep.
I think Boberson addressed the motives for the non-competition crowd a while back. Envy. kinnath above nails it. He may sound trite but it is true and he hit the nail on the head. Those who cant compete seek to disqualify those who can.
Other than that is the looter crowd. For them it is about capturing political power and capturing markets then not letting any competition in.
Given history and human nature I fear we will never see a truly free market except for short periods of time when a market is developing and has not yet gained the kind of momentum or generated the kind of wealth that attracts looters.
“I think Boberson addressed the motives for the non-competition crowd a while back. Envy. kinnath above nails it. He may sound trite but it is true and he hit the nail on the head. Those who cant compete seek to disqualify those who can.”
To stay competitive you have to constantly come up with better products and/or ways to drastically reduce the product’s cost. That shit is not easy to do, because innovation is difficult even for brilliant entities. It is much easier to have a breakthrough idea, capitalize on it, then have government help you create a niche where you can avoid competition so you can just cruise along without having to bother making it better or cheaper.
No one is commenting because we read it and nodded our heads. Yep. Yep. Yep. He’s got it. Yep.
2nded.
Originally I was not going to post this cause on review it seemed off… like it did not work.
The style is a bit disjointed, but the substance is on the mark and each point is clearly made and defended. Overall, it is a good article, especially as a jumping-off point for further thought and (most importantly for this site) comments.
The style is a bit disjointed
At least there were no hyphen-quotes.
Somehow I lost the alt text on the first pic
Fixed.
thanks
Younger, stupider me subscribed to this idea. The fact that I never bothered to pursue it to its logical conclusion seems apt. Because the people who still think this way only do so because they don’t put much thought into things. And of course, have no understanding of human nature.
“Yes.”
/Bill Deblasio
I have aftennheard that healthcare is too important to be left up to the market. I counter with it’s too important to not be left up to the market.
Socializing a product creates stagnation. With no profit motive, there is no incentive to innovate. There is no incentive to streamline, or have better service, or create new technology.
MRI machines still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars even though the technology is 50 years old. In an unregulated free market, the cost of those machines would be a fraction of that and the availability for consumer use would be greatly expanded.
The FDA testing procedures inflate the costs of new drugs being introduced to the market. The licensing apparatus for medical care providers creates huge barriers to entry that restruct supply and increase cost.
Certificate of need laws create artificial shortages.
With no profit motive, there is no incentive to innovate.- except the good will of those angels who work for government.
*deep chuckle*
/Government Devil.
In my experience the people that advocate the hardest to kill the profit motive always want that to be done to other people. Never to themselves. When you for example tell them it will mean big cuts in pay for people in the medical industry they are fine with that because those people make a lot of money. You ask the people that feel fine fucking over medical professionals and making them virtual slaves to take a big paycut for the good of others, and they will fucking blow a gasket. It’s all about envy and jealousy driving them to accept shitty systems as long as they feel it hurts others more.
“I have aftennheard that healthcare is too important to be left up to the market. I counter with it’s too important to not be left up to the market.”
Ask these people if they would trust a ride from an Uber/Lyft driver over some dude that says he is from the government and there to help…
Suddenly these idiots have no problem jumping into the private company car, but I bet money they would not get in the car driven by some dude claiming to be there from the government.
You haven’t heard the argument that the state licensed taxis are safer then Uber/Lyft because they’re licensed by the state?
Yeah, sure….
Unless you are on dialysis or whatever, you’ll die faster from a lack of groceries than you will from lack of healthcare, but I don’t hear anyone bitching about nationalizing the Piggly Wiggly.
That’s because those uppity pretenders want Whole Foods instead. At Piggly Wiggly shit is not organic, yo!
Wait, it doesn’t contain carbon molecules?
I only eat organic table salt. It really helps my body cleans toxins when I get into a really deep Ardha Matsyendrasana to open my heartspace and massage my pancreas .
Could MSG be classified as an organic table salt?
The variant I can see sympathy for is the if not got doing X then X won’t be done.
Possibly true for billions in research to cure a few hundred people but then it gets applied to retirement saving or Healthcare which is patently untrue
Dammit that is govt not got
St. Judes is here to see you…
Sorry to OT, but I posted on the opioid litigation in the last thread for anyone who has already moved on. Looks like I’m supposed to earn my pay today (the nerve), so I won’t be around much.
Definitely not either the leftstream media or rightstream media narratives during the past news cycle. Definitely worth reading. However, it definitely did not address “public nuisance.”
Check back, I added a comment on public nuisance claims.
And one last update in response to Pie’s query.
Nicely done for so few words. Thanks for the addition and for the notice that you had added to your previous comment.
Saw it. Thx. Seems to be consistent with what I’ve read as well.
“Working better” is probably 9th or 10th on the list of priorities when it comes to public services.
This is a good point. Public services are judged by a different set of metrics, such as diversity, and how happy they make the union members.
Well, public services have customers and users, and they aren’t the same. The customer is essentially the government whether the service is provided by a private contractor or a public worker, while the user is the poor schmuck who has to pay for it in taxes and is stuck with using it.
And, I would add, if you think about how your decision would differ if you were buying a car for someone you don’t know using their money versus buying one for yourself with your own, that’s why the public spending is such a shitshow.
Do not leave out politicians buying cars for themselves and their friends with OPM which also explains a lot
Not for all people. Some are idealistic ignorant. these are the people I, on occasion, think of trying to convince
You can’t help those people, I’m afraid.
well they are most of the population so we are proper screwed aren’t we?
It *should* be as easy as pointing to the ample evidence that private does work better. And for some people, it is. But most people don’t like having everything they thought they knew being challenged.
These are people who are at the top of their field, the best education, and furthermore many of them do work they enjoy and are passionate about. And still, without some competition, they were complacent for years and the innovation rate quite slowed down.
I don’t even think it’s necessarily complacency, so much as an absence of any standard to judge performance by. Save a little money using re-usable rockets? Well, who’s to say that’s a more important priority than ensuring a diverse ground crew? Probably not your political masters. It’s the problem with almost any centralized state function. There is no incentive structure to focus even the best and most motivated minds. The only viable alternative is a type of regulatory capture.
Without competition, a goal has to be imposed upon an organization or else it just drifts along. JFK putting that “man on the moon by the end of the decade goal” on NASA was a kick in the pants. What’s NASA’s goal now? What are they working on?
diversity? climate change? fucking loving science?
DCCFLS+
Exactly. But, even those particular goals, absent something central to the market, are usually arbitrary. Why the moon and not Mars? Why a decade and not a year? It sounds good on paper and provides something to shoot for. But, mostly, it’s nothing all that more necessary than diversity, climate change, or fucking loving science.
I think time and again the private sector delivers better results, but more importantly the private sector is way, way better at responding to feedback, in the sense both of actual complaints or praise but I think most importantly in the sense of economic decision-making based on changes in the market. The problem with the public sector is that it removes the consumers of a product or service at least one step away from the producers, so there’s a lag in feedback, and because public is the same as compulsory, there’s no motivation for providers to respond to consumers. It’s the difference between buying a cell phone and registering a car.
What the public sector does do reasonably effectively is provide a third party that can offer a (not THE, just A) way out of “tragedies of the commons” type of situations, in addition to its obvious role as an arbiter of justice–try not to choke on your lunch or laugh yourself into a hernia on that last one.
The private sector is lots of individuals and companies. Some of them get stuck in a rut and stop responding to feedback. They go out of business and somebody else steps into that void.
Yes, and that’s one of the biggest problem with having the government do something. If they do a terrible job, what happens? Are they going to go away? No, they will just keep on doing a terrible job forever. If you’re lucky, you get some half-assed reform every once in a while.
If they do terrible, obviously that agency is underfunded – duh!
Imagine that in the private sector.
“The VHS video division is performing horribly!”
“Better increase funding. 10% sound good?”
“Make it 20%, just to be sure.”
“We’ll increase streaming prices to pay for it, they’re doing just fine.”
What business managers call “throwing good money after bad”.
Don’t forget the bad incentives that come with government budgets.
The problem with the public sector is that it removes the consumers of a product or service at least one step away from the producers, so there’s a lag in feedback
Absolutely this. I can vote at the cash register every day, but only at the ballot box once every two years. Further, those cash register votes are dis-aggregated, it’s not like I have to vote for Coke if I want to vote for Disney or Honda, I can choose a le carte, but with politics you are stuck with package deals.
“We cannot gamble with our children’s future, I heard.”
22,000,000,000,000 dollars in federal debt bags to differ.
To generalize, we want X, and doing it requires people, materials, management, in general cash, mullah, dough. So the debate boils down to who uses these things better and I struggle to understand how some believe it is the government.
I’d suggest that the issue here comes down to the possibility that the people advocating for government don’t really want X, but are using X as a front for their real agenda. It’s why you’ll see those screaming that we need more infrastructure projects screaming just as loudly in opposition to private infrastructure projects. It’s not infrastructure projects, per se, that they want, but uneconomical infrastructure projects that favor them or their constituency. It’s why you find those demanding we need to reduce carbon emissions enraged with fracking (or even the idea of nuclear) despite the fact that it lowers our net carbon imprint. They aren’t after carbon reductions. They’re after command and control of energy.
Honestly, writing this I was thinking at fairly well meaning people, friends people I work with who in their way want “good things “
And my comment doesn’t necessarily preclude that. Lots of good, decent, otherwise well-meaning, people sometimes want irrational things. They sometimes want 2+2=73. And coming to terms with that is something people are only rarely inclined to do. People want to feel good about themselves as generous. But, they don’t want to give up their stuff to do it. So, they look to government provision and convince themselves that they’re being generous spending someone else’s money. Or they attach themselves to the latest outrage of the week, secure in the knowledge that it’s someone else who’ll be the target. These aren’t human monsters. They’re everyday people who mostly pride themselves on the noble sentiments. And they’ll hide their wishes, even to themselves, under the rubric of wanting X when X is only incidental to their actual wishes.
Those people are useful idiots for the ones who are just looking out for their own interest. E.g. lots of people “care” about education. Teachers unions put on a nice show of being on those people’s side, but they aren’t. Of course they aren’t, because they are just regular people like you and me. But they do a good enough job pretending they “care”, so that the little people just go along with it and don’t trouble themselves looking for something better.
Those people are useful idiots for the ones who are just looking out for their own interest.
You’re more emotionally generous than I am. I think a lot of these people are, on some level willing accomplices. They want to feel like they’re better people because they love children more than the next guy (okay, maybe not OMWC). How many of those people are volunteering their own time and money to the children? How many are insisting their own property assessments need to be raised? How many are even paying attention to actual educational results, which you’d think would be their focus if education were their motive?
They can be well meaning and just be incapable of putting 2 desires in opposition and reconciling down to one. People in SF simultaneously want more affordable housing and no new construction, they just cannot recognize the conflict
I think the Gov based, non-profit driven solution, to produce X looks like they would be less costly and harmful from a superficial level. As Pie said above, most people don’t understand or know what profit driven true competition does to drive innovation, quality, cost improvements and service. If you remove one or more of these you have a product that is not as good as it could be.
Nice article Pie. One exception – prisons. Certainly not as the contracts are structured now. The incentives are all wrong and it would be very difficult to write a contract that got them right.
prisons are very different as the ehm customers don’t have much say
Thing is, the prisoners aren’t the customer. The government is.
that was part of the joke
That’s an artifact of the state abrogating to itself the power to assign a particular prisoner to a particular prison. If a sentence was “incarceration in a Class B prison for 10 years” with the prisoner having the power to select *which* private Class B prison to be assigned to, you’ll have a lot of private prisons fighting for that convict to pick them. Then the government offers up, for every Class B convict, say $X paid monthly for the 10 years + a $Y kicker at years 1, 2, 4, and 16 if the convict does not get convicted after release.
With proper design of what a “Class B prison” must be like, and what X and Y are, there’s no reason this kind of thing can’t work. And the incentives are much better. Every conviction is a financial burden on the state, unlike now where there are very strong incentives to increase the free work provided to the state in prisons. The prison, being a private actor outside of the state, loses a lot of its legal teflon that state actors enjoy, reducing their propensity to violate inmate rights. Prisons need to provide better security and governance than they do now, in order to attract new inmates, reducing the utility provided by the ethnic gangs that provide security and governance and train up inmates to be recidivist when released. And we reduce the petty indignities like taking a Maryland inmate very, very far away from their native Baltimore to lock them up, which results in the state breaking up inner city families and punishing innocent family memebers in the (probably not at all common) case of inmates actually being good fathers / husbands.
Charter prisons!
Just like charter schools, except they removed that pesky “snowball chance in hell of happening”.
It’s almost worth trying to make this happen. Unfortunately, the easiest sell would be the one that would ensure no place else adopted it. Submit a proposal to CA that your prison would stress personal growth and development and eliminating the racism/sexism/homophobia/toxic masculinity at the root of crime. Serve the prisoners a vegan diet. Give classes in deconstructing whiteness, creative expression, computer coding, community organizing and environmental activism.
I think it could happen. Once.
That sounds like unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment to me.
Personally, I don’t know what is worse. A jailer that hate’s their inmates, or a jailer that loves them.
homophobia? So the prisoners would want to be with their fellow inmates in that special way?
“Our prison actually prevents prisoners from raping each other.”
Recidivism would be the lagging indicator if I was writing a prison contract.
If you have bad laws, your prison service provider isn’t going to be able to stop recidivism.
Or a good prison contractor will devote resources to teaching the inmates how to effectively skirt those laws in the future.
+1 accounting classes
Two saying kinnath grew up with (from dad and granddad)
1) Good enough for government work
2) I from the government, I’m here to help
Always accompanied by a sly grin and a wink.
Whenever I pass some construction site where I see a bunch of people watch one person work (usually a young kid), I know that is a government entity they work for. Private sector companies do the opposite thing and have one supervisor making sure all others are productive.
One guy to dig, one to monitor the hole, one guy to monitor the guy digging the hole, and one guy who can assist in monitoring the monitors in case there is a union or state mandated break.
I was always partial to the guy holding up the shovel so that the workspace didn’t become dangerously cluttered. Its a hard job, and you really gotta get the technique down if you hope to get through a full shift. Remember, tip 3 inches in the ground, right boot on the back of the blade, left hand on top of the pommel, chin on the back of the hand. That way you can slide your gut into the handle and take the strain off your back.
You need three promotions and at least a decade of seniority to reach “Shovel Holder Trainee”
No, you need to be the son of a road construction CivE.
Unions are terrified, Chinese working on a shovel app that will allow it to stand up by itself.
The Segway Shovel.
As the son of a retired road construction CivE, I can assure you that this is not true. 99.99% of road work is done on bid, with bidding being restricted to organizations that have demonstrable capacity to complete the work. If you think those 2 or 3 companies operating in a single city are going to cut their own thought by actually engaging is some dog-eat-dog bidding like anything other than a monopolist (ie city pays per man hour worked, overtime paid at a higher rate, etc) you are nuttier than a squirrel.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
As a young stripling, I used to envy the guys in Uni who got summer jobs with Edmonton Parks & Recreation — it wasn’t for nothing that the “Parks & Rec” department was nicknamed “Park & Rest.”
I had a friend who worked for the BLM as a firefighter and said it was the world’s greatest welfare program.
My Dad’s last job before retirement was working for the county highway department as a pot hole fixer. He said it was the best and easiest job he ever had.
So who here recognized the source of the first picture?
You mean the Screenshot from Brazil?
yes
Then I suppose I did.
“Buttle” gave it away.
I never even watched the movie… but yes, that was the detail I keyed off of.
Me neither, to my shame. Just parts of it.
#metoo
Same.
It doesn’t seem to be part of Netflix or Amazon prime.
I have the DVD. Really, I have no excuse.
I didn’t recognize it per se, but “Buttle” was a dead giveaway.
Buttle.
I did.
“You need to use crowdsourcing and big data and machine learning these days to stay relevant you know, basic bitch reasoning don’t cut it no more. So to proceed…”
Yeah, about this. I am currently writing AI and have been doing enough of it that I can tell you that real AI requires machine learning. However, machine learning requires an incredible amount of accurate data and people that really understand how to model the learning process. And contrary to the propaganda about how simple this shit is, AI without machine learning is basically code that executes to fulfill the will of the coders that put it together, and not worth much unless there is an agenda to be met (look at Google or Facebook for the shit they pretend is unbiased).
When the money comes from taxes or the kind(s) of borrowing to be repaid by taxes, the customers that count are the bureaucrats and/or politicians who exchange money for the recipients attempting to provide the product(s) and/or services. The for-profit equivalent is when an employer hires someone to provide an employee perk or, if you prefer, non-monetary benefit. The customer that counts for the perk provider is the employer, not the employees.
Hypothetically, if the US Postal Service (USPS) were cut off from ‘general revenue’ (from Treasury) to cover its ‘shortfalls’ and had to rely on its ‘special revenue’ (money the USPS collects and does not pass on to Treasury) to cover its expenses, then the USPS’s service to the people paying the ‘special revenue’ would improve.
‘Private’ is often not ‘private-private.’ ‘Private’ interests compete for legislative carve outs and for regulatory rulemaking that will benefit them and punish their enemies rather than using campaign contributions, hosting campaign events, and lobbying for government to leave them alone. ‘Private’ interests also seek out money from taxes and the kind(s) of borrowing to be repaid by taxes. The article compares SpaceX to the European Space Agency, but most (not all) of SpaceX’s launches are financed by this bad money.
There are also at least two moral arguments about ‘private’ versus ‘public’ (although using those terms seems somehow to play into the pro-totalitarian narrative):
Both money from taxes and the kind(s) of borrowing to be repaid by taxes are immoral. Leftists feel free to freak at that idea. This does not forbid government-run, as long as the government is financed otherwise.
As long as the government version is not an artificial monopoly and the money paying for the government version comes from voluntary source(s), not only is government doing it not wrong, but telling the people they cannot have government do it is wrong. Anarchists and libertarians feel free to freak at that idea, even though the two are supposed to differ in that the latter wants non-zero government. Even assuming for the sake of argument that ‘private’ always provides the product and/or service better than ‘public,’ sometimes people do not want better. Who are you to tell them they have to take Lyft or Uber instead of socialized taxi (this is separate from regulating the former two to be more like the third)? Or require people with dumpsters or generic equivalents to reliably get their compost, garbage, and recycling collected by faceless corporations when they want unionized people on those trucks who have to answer to an elected commission? Or force anti-profit people who take their children to museums, parks, zoos, and so on to not have that refuge from being victimized from profit-seekers? Do you doubt that given a choice, there would be a market for government inspection of meat, poultry, and seafood? Or allowing airlines to choose whether or not to have government-run rules for what people can and cannot bring onto an aircraft and government-run security theater screening of passengers regardless of whether or not it does anything about the risks of flying?
“‘Private’ is often not ‘private-private.’ ‘Private’ interests compete for legislative carve outs and for regulatory rulemaking that will benefit them and punish their enemies rather than using campaign contributions, hosting campaign events, and lobbying for government to leave them alone. ‘Private’ interests also seek out money from taxes and the kind(s) of borrowing to be repaid by taxes. The article compares SpaceX to the European Space Agency, but most (not all) of SpaceX’s launches are financed by this bad money.”
I will slightly disagree by noting that there are companies who do “defensive” lobbying. I’ve been a part of some of that where your company is minding its own business and finds out that there is legislation being proposed that would make what you’re doing either (a) much more difficult and costly, or (b) completely illegal. Most times the origin of said regulation is your competition (been on the wrong end of that). Other times, it’s simply some douchebag bureaucrat or citizen busybody with a sad story complaining to their pol to “do something!!!!”
Regardless of the source, the real origins of the problem, and it goes directly to Pie’s underlying question about “why do people want government to do X,” lies in the public education system. It didn’t used to be this way. When this country was founded, it wasn’t quite Libertopia, but it was damn close:
(1) People lived in small communities, but if it became a pain in the ass, you could simply leave and start a new community. See, e.g., Roger Williams leaving Puritan Massholes to found Rhode Island;
(2) Outside of the local, no one saw themselves as being part of some giant mega-State. Consider this, the only thing that unified them to form “a more perfect union” was the Townsend Duty, an additional tax by the British to help prop up the East India Company. In fact, right before the Boston Tea Party, GB was willing to lower the duty to compete with black market tea and the colonists still said “suck it” and dumped the tea – ON PRINCIPLE. Try to imagine such a thing now;
(3) There was a great deal of respect for other people’s sovereignty and their right to find their own way in the world – with the one glaring exception that you’e all thinking of since you started reading this: SLAVERY.
And the fact that your mind went there is a direct result of the public education system; SLAVERY has been the great Progressive weapon that has allowed them to march through (childhood) education and hence the rest of it was doomed once they got control of indoctrinating children. That single issue, the fly in the ointment of the founding of this country, has allowed Progressives to bludgeon their opponents into either silence or mumbling apologies. It has been the Great Cudgel against our Republic. One look at the (D)’s today and what you see is the inevitable end-state of the loss by Team Elephant’s inability to tell Donkeys to sit down and shut the fuck up. The reason for that failure, however, is that the R’s were more than happy to use faux moral-outrage for their own culture war issues.
People want to see themselves as “good” and “moral” in their own narrative. The D’s have masterfully manipulated generations by vilifying profits and business (which has long antecedents in European history), rewriting history, and controlling what is “correct” for people to think and believe. That’s why people believe that ‘government is good and profit is bad, mmkay?’
Enjoyed your comment. One minor point:
I could be wrong, but IIRC: Roger Williams did not choose to leave Mass. He was banished twice. The first time, instead of leaving in September, he was holding pot luck parties at his place to feed himself and his then-pregnant wife. They came for him one winter night, but one of the Board of Governors of the colony sent word that got to Roger Williams first. A guy who went to Cambridge on a languages scholarship walked on foot for weeks, living off the land for food. He found a spot. His wife and about followers joined him. The second time, the land got annexed out from under him. That’s when he moved to what he called Providence. This time, he had a treaty with the Native Americans that proclaimed him the government over white people in an area where being white without Roger Williams’ auspices meant slavery or death.
Interesting. Thanks for the follow-up. I don’t recall that from my grade school years, but you’re probably right. I don’t think it changes the point, but maybe not the best example. There were others hat jumped to mind, but I grabbed him over some other possibilities.
I did know that the Natives in RI were at one time ascendant and crackers were merely tolerated. Most of RI – especially the southern end of the state – has Native names to this day: Mesquamicut, Narraganssett, Meshantucket, Pequot, Conimicut, and on and on. A lot of the small towns, and a big chunk of the roads, made for quite the pronunciation work as a kid.
In commie Romania, many factories were not driven by profit and had no competition to speak of, and yet, shockingly, were extremely inefficient, had stocks of products that no one wanted and shortages of products in demand, all of poor quality, and overall no way of knowing if the way they produce is good. In general if a company changes something and profit improves, they get the info that the change was good.
A capitalist monopolist at least provides (for the most part) a quality product which does not require armed enforcers to make a market.
ComBlok Romanian K98’s somehow were very good. Wonder why those were such an exception….
Because someone involved was competitive. Even without the obvious profit motive, there are people who just instinctively want to be awesome and win.
I love that about people.
No, its because the state was in wartime competition with the west. It wasn’t profit-based motivation, but it was a competitive motivation. The state will always be pretty efficient at collecting taxes (obvious reasons) in peacetime and operating the military once it’s elbow-deep in a real war that has existential risk (those that don’t get efficient don’t last long enough to get elbow deep).
Not sure if competitive but doing the best job out of honor pride whatever. My father was like that and more than one engineer in the factory he worked for. But for each like them there were 5 who were more interested in commie party politics and scrounging and advancing.
Socialism is a magical thing. It turned Venezuelans poor, Germans inefficient, Chinese into bad farmers, and Eastern Europeans / Russians into bad engineers.
We cannot gamble with our children’s future, I heard. But what is the alternative? Sticking them all in a failing system?
The problem is not failure. The problem is *compulsory* failure. Failure can be extremely educational.
I missed this when it happened.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parents-disabled-man-killed-costco-said-they-begged-duty-officer-n1046726
The attorney said he’s not sure if there was an altercation before the shooting, and urged authorities to release footage from the scene.
But a judge has ordered that videos remain sealed to the public for a year pending an investigation by prosecutors who are deciding whether to file criminal charges.
I’m sure an ordinary person would get the same treatment from the prosecutor after shooting three people in a crowded store.
Of course they would. And then the video would be “leaked” somehow.
The cop was either firing blindly out of panic, or has the shittiest aim ever known.
So this guy was “pushed” from behind and fell, and then shot THREE PEOPLE in a COSTCO. And the judge has sealed the videos because the prosecutors HAVEN’T YET DECIDED TO CHARGE HIM.
No double-standard here, nope. Really interesting that this happened in a state with infamously strict gun laws and with politicians itching to ban private gun ownership, by the way. I wonder if there’s something about those two mind sets that fit together especially well.
He’s a public employee. I can see sealing evidence against a private citizen pending charges, but doesn’t the public have an interest in knowing what pubsecs are up to, that they don’t have with private citizens?
Dean, you know that while *logically* we should be holding armed agents of the state to a *higher* standard, in practice we need to hold them to a *lower* standard. Otherwise they might have second thoughts before they throw a flashbang grenade into a baby’s crib or execute a pit maneuver to push a 4×4 truck into oncoming traffic.
Yes. 100% yes, and because even though he was off-duty he used the privileges and authority granted to him as a police officer to a.) carry a concealed firearm and b.) identified himself as a cop prior to shooting. If he was a cop but was living by “little people” rules and paying for his own defense, it wouldn’t be as repugnant, but this is absolute bullshit.
In an economics class, long ago, the professor offered up an anecdote. In a Russian nail factory, if the production target was defined by weight, they made a relatively low volume run of big heavy nails. If the production target was numerical, they made lots and lots of little nails. In no case did it ever occur to them to go out and ask carpenters what sort of nails they wanted, or run down to the hardware store and look on the shelves to see what people were buying.
One of my favorite stories from the 90s when I was travelling to Moscow.
Company A built large trucks. Company B built buses. The truck and the bus shared a common chassis. So:
Company A builds a truck.
The truck is shipped to Company B.
A crew from Company B goes out with sledge hammers and removes anything that isn’t part of the chassis.
Company B then builds a bus.
There was a joke in Romania.
Romanians were building Dacia cars and the Americans wanted to know how they did it so they stole the plans. And the result was a tractor. An they tried again, maybe the took the wrong plans, and it was a tractor. Then they got a Romanian engineer to the US and asked whats the deal? We follow the plans and it comes out a tractor. Same for us, says the Romanian, then we use a file to get it into shape.
I am not sure it translates.
It translates well enough.
the general idea is that various factories made pieces of equipment that did not fit together and you needed to lets say pot process them to install
It translates, and it’s pretty funny, too.
No one needs 8 types of nails.
If I recall correctly there was one factory that, one year, built exactly one gigantic nail that filled their quota. I’m not sure if the story is apocryphal.
probably is. Not even commies went that far
The Tsara Nailya
“I pretty much agree with everything you wrote, Pie. I know that’s not very interesting or helpful, but I think you NAILED it.” — Tundra, emphasis added
I pretty much agree with everything you wrote, Pie. I know that’s not very interesting or helpful, but I think you nailed it. We are nothing without competition. No matter what, hierarchies form and not everyone will end up “winning” in a particular endeavor. But there are a nearly unlimited number of places to try to find your place.
This stupidity about trying to flatten hierarchies ignores the fact that striving to climb is a very natural and fulfilling thing for a great many people.
Nice article.
“This stupidity about trying to flatten hierarchies ignores the fact that striving to climb is a very natural and fulfilling thing for a great many people.”
the people that want to flatten it tend to be the types that have no talent to do anything of value, are lazy and unproductive but envious of those that are, want to keep what they have gotten without putting any more effort into it, or have multiple of those at work…
See Bernie Sanders.
Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s
It’s because we used to smoke cigarettes instead of huffing down meds.
Ciggies > Meds. Come at me.
Is the gut bacteria thing real science?
It is, but I’m betting this particular assertion is mostly bullshit.
I weigh the exact same as I did in the eighties. I’m a little less strong than I was because I’m in my 50s now, though. I’m shocked by how much everyone eats. Fucking people huff down inordinate amounts of whatever it is they’re eating. I eat less of better foods and feel fine. I am pissed that the quality of many foods has declined because of the removal of fat, lard, salt and sugar. Some of us don’t need to lose weight and just want good tasting food, dammit.
Counterpoint: I put on about 318 lbs since the beginning of the 80’s. Checkmate, atheist.
it clearly has influence on body function and various health aspect. Probably also weight gain. It is not the main factor.
Smart phones and sedentary lives have nothing to do with it.
But not smoking does, so start smoking.
I am saving my lungs for weed whenever the Feds decide to legalize it.
Save your lungs, get the gummi bears
Tried my first edible recently. Absolutely excellent.
Yeah bro – smoke a ciggie after ingesting an edible.
I was going to say this. The invention of the internet means we have to expend a lot less effort to get the same things as people in the 80s.
I believe people ate less processed crap back then… Also time was needed to get to the current size. There may be endocrine disruptions that have some influence but it is mostly the food.
Who cares start smoking.
If you’ve tried to do the Keto diet, you’ll know that there is sugar hidden in almost everything out there. Ketchup, BBQ sauce, salad dressing, you name it, and it is in the form of high fructose corn syrup. I wonder if it was like that in the 80’s? Or if the sugar was only in the obvious things like cereal and cookies?
Who cares start smoking.
Bingo
That said, I ate a lot of sugar growing up in the 70’s and 80’s but I was constantly active.
Now, I reserve sugar for a treat and I don’t eat pasta or much bread.
*Finishes the Sun Drop*
Buuurrrp.
What’s that now?
crusty is on the payroll of Big Tobacco
Message me for a free Marlboro tote bag!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl775R5TuO8
“…might have somehow… …might be a sign…”
Sure, OK.
Uh, no. Not even close.
Do you get blowjobs with that $2,800 package?
Hey, they really help with recovery…
Off by about a factor of 10.
I know it’s possible to spend over $3,000 at Equinox, but that is an extreme. I think even at a place like Life Time it can be close to $2,000, but they have everything at those places, including child care.
I don’t know. Around here some of those high end places can be $160 a month which is $1920 a year. I can see some LA or New York places being even higher. Of course there are always cheaper options starting with some type of Planet Fitness to just lacing up a pair of shoes and start running.
It varies wildly around here. 24 Hour Fitness is something like $1200 a year for a multi-club membership. There’s a YMCA that took over a really high-end athletic club with multiple pools and a huge weight room that’s more like $600 a year. The club up the street, described as “bougie” and a place for women who spend a lot of their husband’s money on Lululemon to wait for the nanny to take their kids to school, is somewhere around $1500.
$2800 is absolutely bonkers. I don’t believe it.
$2800 is totally possible in a major metro area. At that point, you are either purchasing a spa-like facility, or lots of 1-on-1 time or small-group time with trainers. And the trainer isn’t some dumb-fuck 19 year old with an NAMS cert and a shitty polo shirt, they’ll either be a current or former high-level athlete in a non-profitable sport (like olympic weightlifting or polo) or they’ll be the kind of folks that train pro athletes (like the camps NFL hopefuls go to before the Combine).
But you gotta try to spend that much money. My membership at the YMCA, which is expensive for a regular gym (free child care, dozens of locations, lots of facilities), is “only” like $1400 a year.
Should be noted, this assume the family rate. I’d have a hard time seeing $2800 a year for a single person at an actual gym that’s not a spa and not a coach with a box around him.
I’m sure in the proper Belmont-esque location you can find one that expensive to keep the poors out, but that’s hardly going to be common.
you can find one that expensive to keep the poors out
Ding ding ding. We have a winner.
Yeah, all those prices I quoted were single person plans. You could get it up to $2000 by adding on a ton of time with individual trainers and premium classes and whatever, but that article is talking about a guy going somewhere with a cable machine and maybe an indoor track. There may be places in the US that cost that much, but I know for a fact that you can find a decent place in the DC metro, even in the nice parts, for south of $70 a month for one person. At $2800 you’re approaching entry-level dues at a modest country club.
Of course, I don’t think inflation has put the price of a decent pair of running shoes or a chin-up bar out of the reach of most Americans, either.
The inflation rate since 1987 makes that a $1,287 fitness membership back then. I wasn’t a gym member of any kind until the mid-90s, and I don’t recall it being $100/month.
Meat makes you fat? lol
I grilled up two 24 oz porterhouses last night.
Still skinny.
First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight.
Finally, Kuk and the other study authors think that the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now.
Might, or might not. Jes’ spitballin’ here, apparently.
All this based on a study:
In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.
I’d love to know where their data on people’s diet and exercise thirty years ago, and today, came from. Due to the don’t eat fat and food pyramid movements, I suspect that there is more sugar today, even in a diet that is superficially similar to one from 30 years ago.
“In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.”
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. They’re eating more, exercising less, or both.
We (the country) are *substantially* richer than we were in the 80s. Of course we are eating more.
All horseshit. We are fatter today because we sit on our asses more. That is the main thing fat people don’t want to hear. They want to hear that they can lose weight while they sleep and that their obesity is not their own fault.
I think they should all start smoking ciggies.
I find your views intriguing and wish to smoke your newsletter.
I think its not entirely a coincidence that obesity increased as smoking decreased. I certainly know people who porked up when they quit smoking.
I wonder what the net health impact is, swapping lung cancer, etc. for all the obesity related conditions. We’re probably better off collectively, but not by much.
Of course this is a study that will never be undertaken.
I wonder what the net health impact is, swapping lung cancer, etc. for all the obesity related conditions. We’re probably better off collectively, but not by much.
I can’t imagine we are that much better off.
The dirty little secret of smoking-related deaths is they tend to be fast and therefor cheap. Obesity related conditions are chronic, can go on for decades, and are likely more expensive. Its not just diabetes; a fair percentage of knee and hip replacements are due to obesity, etc.
I’ve never heard of 2nd-hand fat.
Never flown coach then.
Psychology Today says hold my pinot grigio.
First result on a search for second hand fat
From the article:
I see this cracker spent 0 time in the hood.
Wow, that guy is an asshole!
Wow, that guy makes me want to smoke more. In his apartment.
At this point everyone knows, “Your right to
smokesay something I don’t like ends atthe tip ofmynoseears.”My rights are not dependent on your reaction to me exercising them.
Really? You think second hand smoke is more like speech than a punch?
I think of it like any other pollutant that’s noxious, chronically dangerous, and acutely dangerous to a few people, and thus a violation of a persons rights if they are exposed to it without their consent.
I used to work at a local pub with sidewalk seating. I always used to chuckle when I’d see a table of middle-aged women get terribly bitchy looks on their face because a smoker walked by and then go right back to their conversation as bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled past them up the street for two hours straight.
You think second hand smoke is more like speech than a punch?
Yup. The evidence on the actual clinical risk of second hand smoke is weak and supports a de minimis, at best, level of risk for second hand smoke that is encountered casually. Chronic exposure may carry some small level of appreciable risk, but that’s not what we are talking about.
At some point, you have to accept that life is not totally free of risk, and that you just have to tolerate some level of risk. You might as well say, based on the level of clinical risk, that your right to drive a car ends at the tip of my nose. If any
Second hand smoke may be offensive to you, but you taking offense at my exercise of my rights does not reduce my rights at all. That a pollutant is “noxious” (read: offensive) is irrelevant. If second hand smoke was, in fact, chronically dangerous, that would be one thing, but its not. The fact that it may be (and I am not convinced) acutely dangerous to a few people might give some basis for restricting my right to smoke, but heading down that road opens the door for outlawing a lot things, starting with peanuts.
Air conditioning.
In the 80’s it was a luxury of a handful of rich people and getting out of the heat in the summer meant having to go to a mall or some similar place. Today it is ubituitous, 84% of homes and somewhere north of 90% of places of business are air conditioned.
Your body actually expends a pretty significant number of calories attempting to regulate your temperature and we basically just removed that caloric expenditure from pretty much everyone without replacing it
An Unholy Alliance Against Public Transit
FUCK YEAH!
Without public transit, how are we going to efficiently transport the undesirables to the killing fields?
I thought cattle cars were the preferred mode.
Andrew Jackson finds this discussion very confusing.
That’s the thing, as I am sure you are aware even in a state with a planned economy, market forces are still at work. Be it in the form of dangerous black markets or the highly incentivized influence peddling, there are still market dynamics at work. Its just that the incentives get massively screwed up.
In my mind capitalism is not a designed system imposed from above, it is a discription of how people behave in regards to their rational best interest.
In Romania there was no black market in commie times.
In fact first time I saw a black guy in Bucharest was like 1995
ba-dum, bum!
“I’ll be here all week! Try the veal and tip your waitress.”
Or tip the veal and try your waitress.
*golf clap*
Well played.
How David Koch’s 1980 Fantasy Became America’s Current Reality
omg i love the Kochs now!
I skimmed the article but I couldn’t find the part where this became America’s Current Reality. As far as I know none of those things happened.
Yes, but just wanting and advocating for those things caused Leviathan to stumble.
IT’S ALL THEIR FAULT
It’s now part of the conversation.
My God.
No, and a whole pile of shit was added on top of that stuff since 1980.
I’m not sure if this was covered because I only read my own comments: STEEL PANTHER’s Act Wasn’t Affected By #MeToo Movement: ‘We’re Not F**king Changing For Nobody’
I too love subtly.
Subtle enough for you?
“Trans-Am Joe” approves.
forget sexist undertones, it’s the sexist even-harmonics that are the real problem.
I pondered what sort of derp dovetails the best with this excellent article.
[flips through large binder labeled “Extra Strength Derp”]
Ah, here it is:
The Government Must Actually Work
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/08/the-government-must-actually-work
***
The problems with this DMV are not unsolvable. They are actually very, very simple. (1) It’s understaffed, so there are too many customers for too few service windows. (2) It’s unclear what documents people need, and the person at the ticket-handing-out phase does not know what people need to have. (3) The staff haven’t been trained to deal with very common problems, meaning that supervisors are frequently needed. Change those things, you change the whole experience.
…
In reality, “inefficiency” is only one part of the problem here. The main problem is there are only six stations open. This isn’t a problem of government waste, it’s a problem of austerity. Government can do things, but we have to be willing to spend enough money to hire enough people to get the things done. Hire more people, wait times drop, people are happy.
…
We certainly don’t want to start “running government like a business,” because businesses are authoritarian and sociopathic.
***
[anguished Zoidberg groan]
Oh, Nathan. Will you *ever* learn?
For the love of god, Nathan, read a book. Any book! Move your lips if you have to.
I take it Nathan has never obtained a license or otherwise interacted with the DMV.
Oh he has.
***
Once I waited 3 hours at the Boston DMV, only to be told that I’d brought the wrong kind of document—they could only accept a bank statement as proof of address, whereas I had brought a letter from my bank. I had to come back again the next day and wait all over again. This time, going to the Louisiana DMV to transfer my license from Massachusetts, I was determined to get through on the first try. I brought every document I could think of: my passport, my bank statement, my tax return, my old license, my Social Security card.
***
He has also written being unable to figure out how to do his taxes or file the correct forms to get a bulk mail discount for the magazines he sends out.
He’s a walking, talking Onion article: Cravat-wearing socialist with $140,000 in debt complains about taxes, govt bureaucracy.
On the one hand, he probably writes the stupidest stuff on internet and I wish he would stop. On the other hand, I sort of feel sorry for him.
I had to update my license last spring. It took less than 20 minutes. That included one of the new Federally-approved Real ID licenses.
There is no reason for DMV to not work properly where ever you are. Cause it works just fine in Iowa.
You must have been in the cis-hetero shitlord line.
A guy I went to high school with used to be the Secretary of State in Indiana. (He went on to become a congressman). Years ago he revamped the DMV. To this day, it’s still great. Even with a decent line I’m out of there in 15 minutes. Everyone is polite and efficient. They even have a person walking around and checking with the people waiting to make sure they have everything they need ahead of time.
All the DMV-from-hell stories I’ve heard are from big cities (I’m shocked, shocked I tell you).
It’s interesting that Team Blue likes govt services so much, but not enough to administer them well.
At least MN got this whole DMV automated. Oh wait…
https://www.twincities.com/2018/01/04/state-wont-say-when-dmv-problems-will-be-fixed-senator-suggests-it-overhaul/
The funny part is, this guy was as GOP a guy, in as GOP a state, as you can get.
Even in NYC it’s not that bad, except the bit about the first person you encounter having no clue about anything. Whose fault is that? And don’t tell me it’s because they don’t pay that person enough.
When we moved to Iowa it was surprisingly fast to transfer two vehicles from out of state and get our drivers licenses transferred.
Would have been faster but we had no checks and they didn’t take credit cards for those particular services so we had to find an ATM.
In Illinois (Chicago suburbs) it was always a painful process.
Early 00s I waited 3 hours just to renew a license. Late 00s 1.5 hours to register a vehicle. Ugh
Inevitably, government can do anything and everything if we just throw enough money at it.
businesses are authoritarian and sociopathic
Well, somebody’s authoritarian and sociopathic. Odds are, its not the guys who can’t enforce obedience at gunpoint and have to maintain the goodwill of their customers.
For Nathan:
Dysfunction
The only consistent feature of all of your dissatisfying relationships is you.
Also Nathan:
In Defense Of Hatred
Some things are bad and should be hated…
by Nathan J. Robinson
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/08/in-defense-of-hate
***
While everyone should reflect on whether their hatreds are defensible, and it’s easy to get carried away, I think the right kinds of hatred can actually be a sign of elevated intelligence and compassion.
***
Even his hatred is enlightened!
What a prince. An unhinged, spiteful, beautiful prince.
Hmmm, when I go to the DMV no one ever looks at the vehicle I am dealing with nor do they inspect my id unless it is the very specific case of needing to get a drivers license.
What possible reason is there that they cannot do virtually everything the DMV does online with no human interaction. In the rare cases where human interaction is needed why do they not have an online portal via which you can upload documents that will tell you if your documents meet the criteria and if all of the needed documentation is uploaded and that then schedules an exact appointment time to see a specific individual who will review your case files and then finish processing the transaction?
I mean come on if you are going to shill for the government at least acknowledge that there is tremendous inefficiency built into the system
Because dear Nathan is the first guy to ever think of adding resources, adding training or increasing managerial supervision. Where would we have ever been without his managerial brilliance. It puts everyone from Frederick Winslow Taylor to W. Edwards Deming to shame!
Of course, in sane world, there’s a reason none of this ever actually happens. It’s because staff increases don’t always translate to more people doing productive work. And the neither staff nor management have much of an incentive to worry about customer service.
If you’ve tried to do the Keto diet, you’ll know that there is sugar hidden in almost everything out there. Ketchup, BBQ sauce, salad dressing, you name it, and it is in the form of high fructose corn syrup.
Dan T, is that you?
No, it was Kevin.
They sure fool you with the BBQ sauces and Ketchup…Sugar in sweet baby rays? Inconceivable. Next your going to tell me Sugar Smacks or Cookie Crisp have sugar in them.
It’s hidden?
Hey, at my age, I can’t read the nutritional info in 6 point type any more.
Ok, poor choice of words. It is in a lot of things most people wouldn’t expect it to be in, and there’s more if it than most people would expect. I have been checking labels for carbs for a few years, and I’m still often surprised.
No kidding. The carb and sugar content of a lot of processed foods is surprising. For a serious keto diet, you can pretty much write off most of what is in the aisles of a grocery store, rather than around the edge.
The edge of my grocery store contains the fruit juice, the bakery, and the “pizzaria”
I didn’t say everything around the edge is low-sugar/carb, just that its the only place you will find it.
The veggies are not on the edge.
The fresh, not canned or frozen, veggies are on the edge are in every grocery store I’ve ever been in. Generally the first thing off the main entrance.
The main entrance is in the middle, and the first thing you see is the stupid coffee shop, you actually have to turn towards the middle to get to produce.
I didn’t lay out the store.
the first thing you see is the stupid coffee shop
Yeah, same at our main store (a Safeway). Walk straight past it, and you are on the edge of the fresh veggies. I’ve never seen the fresh veggies in the middle of a store (that is, with an aisle between them and the outer wall).
Yup. This also has the health benefit of eating fresh meats & vegetables.
Yes
Go to the isle in your supermarket that carries Pasta Sauce, check the carb content of the jars of sauce. You will find that they range from a low of 4 carbs per serving to a high somewhere in the mid teens for carbs per serving
Unfortunately tomatoes do contain sugar.
Sure but why is there a variance of more than 10 grams per serving between brands? That extra 10 grams is not coming from packing more Tomato into a serving.
I think that was Dave W.
Let’s see what else I have in my extra -strength derp binder:
For Humanity, David Koch Died Decades Too Late
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/david-koch-obituary-billionaire-evil
***
David Koch was an evil man who dedicated his life to evil. Humanity will be coping with the damage he did for centuries.
…
David Koch, the billionaire industrialist who died today, was one of history’s greatest monsters. No, he didn’t try to kill off an entire race of people, eat his enemies, or launch a merciless campaign of rape and pillage that spanned continents. And yet even such horrors as these will pale in comparison to Koch’s handiwork — unless we succeed in stopping it.
…
We can only hope that whatever hell David Koch has gone to, it resembles the one to which he spent his entire life trying to condemn the rest of us. But ultimately, this isn’t about Koch or any of his abominable family. The only reason the Kochs have been able to do what they’ve done — just as the only reason Jeffrey Epstein was able to commit his crimes — is because of the colossal wealth they were allowed to hoard, which they parlayed into political power that they then used to set the world on the path to crisis. And if we don’t deal with this fundamental fact, there will always be more Kochs, more Epsteins, and all the other depraved elites who would happily commit us to extinction if it means another dollar.
***
Jacobin: Shitty Writing by Shitty People
I never heard of the Kochs before a decade or so ago (probably less) when suddenly they became the left’s ultimate bête noire and they were everywhere. Funny, that.
We can only hope that whatever hell David Koch has gone to, it resembles the one to which he spent his entire life trying to condemn the rest of us
You mean a place of peace, freedom, and plenty.
And ballet. 24 hours of ballet, 7 days a week.
“It has beautiful women, fantastic music, great athleticism, and great scenery,” he would say. “What’s not to like?”
Yo, HM – we dropped our convo on meaning and language. I actually think an informed discussion would be a good post here, and nobody better qualified than you to write it.
I was thinking, I think our reflexive “words have meanings” comes from the way we associate meanings with most words after a certain (early?) age. We hear or see the word first, and then learn the meaning.
That guy is an irredeemable cunt.
Fake Mexican craves the blood of children.
https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1166158087830609920
Wow. I don’t recall abortion up to birth being a Dem talking point even a few years ago.
I can’t imagine that it actually plays that well beyond some very particular and vocal groups.
Somehow, a completed (but not partial trip) down the birth canal, or perhaps the cutting of the umbilical cord, converts you from a meaningless, parasitic lump of meat to a person.
Tell us more about how you fucking love science, Beto, and would never engage in magical thinking.
The problems with this DMV are not unsolvable. They are actually very, very simple. (1) It’s understaffed, so there are too many customers for too few service windows. (2) It’s unclear what documents people need, and the person at the ticket-handing-out phase does not know what people need to have. (3) The staff haven’t been trained to deal with very common problems, meaning that supervisors are frequently needed. Change those things, you change the whole experience.
…
In the ’70s, the DMV office in downtown Colorado Springs had a guy stationed in the doorway. He asked what you were coming in for, and would check your paperwork. If you were missing something, he would tell you what you needed, and where/how to get it. This streamlined the process immensely.
Change those things, you change the whole experience.
Assume a can opener.
Leaving aside that I doubt its understaffed, probably just mis-staffed, you need to ask why all those things are part of the system now, and deal with the underlying reasons, or you’re not going to see any real change. See, also, schools, which are always given more money, with no other changes expected except that they will spend more money. And waddayaknow, results are flatlined.
This is the more likely cause.
/source: About to implement a big change for people that won’t change a damned thing because they won’t staff appropriately, and it’s easier to blame the phone system.
Dave Chappelle’s Provocations Have Turned Predictable
Remember, a comedy special, where one person stands up in front of other people and tells jokes.
Jokes. Dissecting jokes.
Derp dude, stay off the Jacobins and such and just read really sad white people painfully try to pick apart a black man’s comedy.
A hundred years ago people would read the Bible over and over again for entertainment and look forward to their annual mailing of the Sears catalog. Now, nobody can possibly produce enough content to feed the beast. Of course you’re going to get part-time baristas overanalyzing shit for attention and money, somebody’s gotta feed the gluttonous Internet.
David Koch was an evil man who dedicated his life to evil. Humanity will be coping with the damage he did for centuries.
Fuck
off
and
die.
Wait, isn’t the world ending in
1210 years?I’m losing track here.
This is a great point. Everything runs on profit, with the possible exception of those few charities staffed by volunteers or those who have taken a vow of poverty. Doctors don’t want to work for a subsistence wage, they are profiting off of health care. Why shouldn’t those who develop new medicines, machines, and techniques likewise profit? Why shouldn’t the people who manage the system, thereby making sure that things run smoothly and the healthcare is available when needed, also profit? If profit is good in part of the system, why wouldn’t it be good throughout the whole system? I have no patience for people who think their personal profit is somehow not profit, and then want to turn around and deny others from making their own profit. They are like people who think their own crap doesn’t stink.
And what’s worse, charging people an amount they find difficult to pay in exchange for your services, or going on strike and fucking abandoning them?
Indeed, that’s my greatest concern about what I see as the coming socialized medicine regime: unionized health care workers. 🙁
My healthcare workers are already largely unionized. Not the MD’s but my nurses strike every couple of years.
OK, one more Jacobin article. It’s wah-fer thin (intellectually)
Abolish the Military
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/veterans-day-american-military-iraq-war-libya-vietnam
***
Even partially weakening the US war machine would afford the socialist initiatives outside the US — particularly those in the Global South — the room to flourish. And if the Left can peel back the humanitarian veneer of American intervention, it will be harder for imperialism to sell its wars to the domestic population. As distant as it may seem, we can construct real bonds of internationalism rooted in solidarity.
Immobilizing the US war machine would be immensely beneficial to virtually every cause with which leftists are concerned. A reinvigorated anti-imperialist, antiwar movement is thus an ideal site for leftists with disparate priorities to converge in ways that can strengthen us all. We overlook this opportunity at our own peril.
***
“Our world conquest scheme was going great! And we would have gotten away with too if it weren’t for you meddling troops!”
we can construct real bonds of internationalism rooted in solidarity.
Fuckin commie. DIAF already.
For some reason some people believe that cooperation and competition are mutually exclusive. That it must be either all against all or all for one. But the reality is that the most efficient system, the system you get naturally under a free market, is one of cooperative-competition. Like-minded individuals cooperate with each other to compete against unlike-minded individuals who are in turn cooperating among themselves. Thus you have companies cooperating internally with the goal of competing with other companies, like sports teams cooperate internally to beat the other teams or political parties cooperate internally in order to triumph over the opposition. The competition lights the fire under the people to be better, as well as sifting out the chaff as you have noted, while the cooperation allows for each winning idea/group to operate efficiently without too much duplication of effort or internal sniping. You need a balance of both for a system to work at its best. A balance that cannot be imposed by a top-down effort, but one that will naturally arise given proper conditions.
Indeed. It presupposes shared goals, at a minimum. Its why “bipartisanship” often exposes politicians for the unprincipled scum they are; they tell their voters their goals are one thing, and then join with people who have incompatible goals to accomplish those incompatible goals.
“I’m all for gun rights” says the politician trying to win in a conservative district. “I’m proud to sponsor common-sense gun safety laws” says the same politician once he is safely elected.
All living things compete. People compete individually and in groups. Human nature is tribal.
I hear people say we’re not monkeys. Go to a zoo and watch them. What do monkeys do? That’s right- they form little groups and throw shit at each other. Sound familiar?
There are no diversity and inclusion experts in the monkey pen.
You know what gets people to stop being so tribal? Money.
And speaking of government.
Paywalled – Former Fed Official Says Central Bank Should Act to Thwart Trump’s Re-Election
A former Federal Reserve official took the unusual step of calling on the central bank to help prevent President Trump’s reelection by refraining from taking measures to stimulate the U.S. economy.
Former New York Fed president William Dudley made his comments, which included criticism of Mr. Trump’s trade policies and the central bank’s apolitical reaction to them, in an article published by Bloomberg Opinion on Tuesday.
The suggestions, which were rejected by the Fed and sparked blowback from economists across the political spectrum, would mark a significant departure from the central bank’s practice of ignoring political considerations when setting policy.
Back in the dark ages when I went to graduate school I had an economics professor who made a name for himself looking at Fed policy and its influence on presidential elections. This was back in the days when such data was much harder to come by. His research showed fed actions had a strong correlation to presidential election years. At the time I was too wet behind the ears to think about looking at the differences between Team Red and Team Blue.
Gee, I didn’t know Dudley was a supporter of Ron Paul’s campaign to End the Fed. Because, if you want to end the Fed, this is how you do it.
Apologies if this has made the rounds already: Socialist Convention in Atlanta
OK, let’s roll the tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPLQNUVmq3o
Featuring jazz hands, preferred pronouns, points of personal privilege, and probably left handed lesbian midget albino eskimos
Wasn’t Lou Reed there?
They must have cut off the video clip before drugs fell out of someone’s ass.
It has made the rounds, as has also someone’s creative edit of it where they put that audio over town-meeting clips from South Park.
Ooh, guess who else was there:
A Gathering of Comrades
Why the DSA convention filled me with hope…
by Nathan J. Robinson
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/08/a-gathering-of-comrades
***
I have a tendency to forget where I am going, or even that I am going somewhere. Crucial possessions are frequently left behind in faraway places. Once I sat at an airport gate, looking at a plane out the window. I watched it arrive, disembark, board again, taxi, take off. Only as I watched it sail through the air did I realize I was supposed to have gotten on it.
…
I have written before about the DSA. My position is that I like them. When I am with DSA members, I feel as if I am part of something humane and powerful and useful. Attending their meetings and protests fills me with a sense of optimism and uplift. But I had never been to their biannual convention before, and I had been warned that watching 1000 socialists try to resolve their differences might cause my impression of the organization to sour.
***
He was probably the smartest person there.
[cue Koyaanisqatsi theme]
***
Of course, none of the warmth and optimism will make its way into the FOX News take on the convention. I was surprised, after coming home, to find that conservatives have seized on a few short clips of the convention, in order to portray attendees as ludicrous lefty snowflakes.
…
YouTube commenters saw the clips as proof the socialists couldn’t get their act together, but they are wrong. Reason’s Robby Soave, one of the slightly less asinine libertarian critics of the left, pointed out that “of all the various factions of progressive activism, the DSA is by far the most organized, and the least likely to be derailed by culturally woke signaling.”
***
It makes sense that he would like Robby the most.
Dave Weigel was there and took the photos.
They didn’t have to do too much editing to make the DSA look like a bunch of authoritarian idiots. As entertaining as it is mock, can you imagine the tension in that room? It seem every one of those half-wits were eagerly awaiting any chance to impose their particular flavor of authoritarianism on everone there. Sound exhausting and horrific to me.